Pathologize Hardship, and the Rest of Us Are Off the Hook
We have been made to feel fragile. But life is hard and precarious, and that is not an automatic risk for mental illness.
Dispatches
The Headband Makes a Comeback
Trained to respect a look that requires, then conceals, significant effort, women learned to mistrust anything that was just plain easy.
How to Get Along in the Universe
How this volume of six hundred pages of Kazakh poetry landed in a town library in St. Louis’ Metro East is a mystery, but it has met its goal.
Turner’s Fire For Our Time
What Turner’s remarkable painting of that long-ago night in London reminds us, though, is that if fire’s wrath is not ours to contain, it will always remain dormant and waiting for our homage, whether framed or not.
The Age of Subtraction
She bought Stephen Sondheim a bottle of the best gin--then saw him pouring white wine. This was, they sighed, the Age of Subtraction.
The Mouse That…Squeaked
I call out the list of what not to feed a mouse. No rhubarb. No raisins or onions, no fizzy bubbles, no caffeine. Definitely no booze. Which is a shame, because I bet she would be even cuter tipsy.
If I Buy Your Groceries
I wrote this little memoir in the spirit of a Cupid, hoping someone out there hears me and tries this out and buys some lonely person who looks like they can really cook their groceries and they cook you dinner and in fact they can really cook well. Dinner together is delicious, and you take it from there, hopefully, expectantly, both of you taking your chances on love and food.
How Pop Culture Made Revolution Safe, or at Least Safer
Rather than skulk in the corners of history some of the most turbulent figures in radical left terrorism found fertile afterlives in popular culture, both film and music, that treat them alternately as doomed romantics or curious, bizarre artifacts.
Installation of the Gerald Early Endowed Chair
Chancellor Martin called the ceremony “a profound testament to friendship, scholarship, and the enduring impact of extraordinary individuals. The Gerald Early Distinguished Professorship represents more than an academic honor. It commemorates the legacies of two remarkable men who have been integral to Washington University: Chancellor Emeritus William H. Danforth and Professor Gerald Early…one of the most significant scholars of our time.”
Language Can Stop Us from Loving the World
“It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.”